Graft probes need courage: Police
Evi Mariani, The Jakarta Post/Jakarta
The Jakarta Police have too many stumbling blocks thrown in their path when they are tasked to handle corruption reports, which flood into their headquarters throughout the year.
As a result, they have only "succeeded" in further processing of four of the hundreds of potential corruption cases.
Of those four, only one has been handed over to prosecutors, Adj. Sr. Comr. Anton Wahono said on Wednesday. Anton is one of the key detectives assigned to look into corruption allegations.
That one was the case of subdistrict chief Lilik Hasanudin, who allegedly amassed Rp 134 million (US$14,889) from a government program meant to be used for poverty alleviation in his subdistrict.
Another is the case of a Rp 46.46 billion corruption allegation at the Pondok Indah branch of state bank BNI.
It took nine months from the time the 8-member team was given the initial report, and they eventually completed the 40- centimeter thick file on five bankers named suspects for embezzling bank money.
"Investigating corruption cases takes a longer period of time than a standard street crime. It's a white collar crime we're talking about. In certain circumstances, especially when facing a sly suspect, we also have to be cunning and play along," the city police special crime detectives chief Sr. Comr. Edmon Ilyas argued.
Anton agreed with his boss, and added that most of the reports brought to them by citizens did not have enough reliable evidence.
One exception to that, he pointed out, was the report on alleged corruption committed by former Depok councillors in which a non-governmental organization (NGO) -- whose name was still being withheld -- enclosed strong evidence with the report.
"Compared to other investigations which may take a long time, in the Depok case, we were able to complete it in five months... We have named 19 suspects in the alleged Rp 9 billion abuse case that took place in 2003."
Anton argued that many of the corruption reports they received turned out to be fictitious or very weak. feel free to cut these para
"How would we follow up on a case if all we could find at the address of the NGO that filed the report was an orphanage, and they did not know anything about the report," he remarked.
The Indonesian Corruption Watch (ICW) executive Danang Widoyoko reiterated that in conjunction with the International Anti-Corruption Day on Thursday, the police should be taking a more active role in investigating corruption.
"Rather than waiting for the public to provide them with the reports and hard evidence, why don't they start to scrutinize the annual reports of the Supreme Audit Agency about irregularities in the Jakarta administration?" Danang told The Jakarta Post.
The city police, which commemorated its 55th anniversary on Monday, should not use the difficulty they have in obtaining evidence as an excuse for their slow pace of work, Danang added, and instead tried to deal with their real stumbling blocks: bribery and political intervention.
"The suspects surely have a lot of money to hire notorious lawyers who usually have some clout over the police, the prosecutors and even the judges," he said.
Anton acknowledged the challenges they face.
"Sometimes we have to deal with 'intervention' (from outside parties) on cases involving big names. We also receive phone calls to persuade us to be lenient toward the suspects," he said. "That's why graft investigators must have a strong mind and courage."